


and what you've taken is no release

by Alana



Category: Homestuck, Namco High, Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, Non-Permanent Character Death, extremely earnest bullshit, haunted by the ghosts of other people's bad choices, lowkey suicidal ideation, time loops, very literally because that ghost is chara
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:48:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28688154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alana/pseuds/Alana
Summary: On July 1st, 2014, the Namco High servers were shut down.
Relationships: Chara & Davesprite, Chara/Davesprite, Cousin (Namco High)/Davesprite (Homestuck), Davesprite & Unrequited pining for John Egbert, Flowey & Davesprite, Your Fave & My Fave
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6
Collections: Exchanges After Dark Birthday Bash 2021





	and what you've taken is no release

**Author's Note:**

  * For [failpail (shamebucket)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shamebucket/gifts).



> I'm going to throw some extremely earnest background notes at the bottom of this chapter. Also in Chapter 2 there's going to be Chara/Davesprite! I just haven't written it yet. Well, except for that other time I wrote Chara/Davesprite for someone else. _I am extremely anonymous._
> 
> Pop down to the bottom for background information regarding the conceit and framing of this story! Or just mcfucking dive in whatever I'm not your mom. (Unless I am. I mean, I might be. I am anonymous. Go clean your room.)
> 
> Title is from [No Release](https://bowman.bandcamp.com/track/no-release) by Michael Guy Bowman. Chapter title is from [Fly](https://bowman.bandcamp.com/track/fly) by same because that one's the Dave song.

There were a lot of things to hate about being stuck in an endless time loop. The heartbreak, the pre-coded events, the things that can't be avoided-- Davesprite's been through it all a thousand times, a hundred thousand times, and if there had been any way for anyone to ask him how he felt about it, he'd tell them what he'd want was for it to end.

Sure, he'd give up his time with Cousin, but maybe he could see John again. It'd be worth it, just to see Egbert's dweeb face one more time.

No one asks him, though. Nothing changes.

Until it just ends, and he realizes how stupid it was to want that.

•••

It seems like a normal loop, Cousin doing their usual rounds, when everything... flickers dark.

"Uh, what? Did the power just go for a sec?" he ask Terezi, who shrugs like _I dunno_ , and Davesprite remembers that he's an idiot and that she can't see in the same second.

Then he can't see, either, everything dropping away like a crashed computer program.

He freezes where he is. No, that's not quite right, he's not sure he's _ising_ right now. The Sprite part of him isn't saying anything, and the bird part of him is cawing, and the Dave part of him is kind of freaking out, except he hasn't had a heartbeat for a while and he's definitely not breathing so there's no way to get the panic out.

 _Okay,_ he thinks to himself, because he can't say anything out loud like he would really, really like to do right now. _Okay so something went wrong. I don't know what went wrong but something went wrong. Maybe it'll fix itself if I just wait it out?_

 **Troubleshoot,** the Sprite part of him pipes up. **Unexpected outcome. Fix it.**

See, this is the problem with being a Sprite, it always wants him to fucking do things. Tutorial this, fix that, correct this player's path-- maybe sometimes he'd like to just be a normal half-boy-half-dead-bird game construct ghost? Also he has no idea how to troubleshoot something like _reality being a thing that's stopped happening_ so deep in his heart of hearts he flips off the Sprite part of him.

 **Troubleshoot,** it repeats, uncaring of his mental middle finger. **Unexpected outcome. Fix it.**

_Okay sure well how do you think i should start doing that huh? I don't think I have eyes right now, or hands, or, like, a body, fuck this is weird, fuck why is my body gone--_

**Troubleshoot. Unexpected outcome. Fix it.**

_Fine,_ he thinks, and the Sprite part of him shuts up for at least a little while. (Inside him the seconds tick up. Four seconds since the Sprite said something. Eighty-seven seconds since reality stopped. Two-hundred-fifty-three-million-eight-hundred-seventy-six-thousand-two-hundred-and-one since he became what he is.) So... no reality, right? But clearly he's still, like, _here_ , something about him is sticking to something, because if reality was gone-gone he'd just be dead. Well, deader. God damn he needs to not think about that right now. Okay. So maybe it's the sprite. The coding. Code. He's been in a game, right? So the game crashed. So he's gotta... restart the game, and then he should have his body back.

But-- how is he supposed to do that, exactly? Ugh, okay, well, no physical body, but he has his mind; he'll just... try thinking at it.

 _Can the dating sim turn back on please and thank you I'm sorry I wanted to get out of it this is way, way worse,_ he thinks into the nothing around him, and nothing answers him. _Computer, run program?_ he tries, in his best Kirk voice, which isn't very good at all even though he doesn't even actually have a voice but he knows his Kirk impression is shit so it sounds like shit like this. Absolute nothingness keeps being all that's happening outside the bubble of himself, so, like, that sucks.

_... what connections are available? _he queries into the darkness, and gets a response from the Sprite instead, which he'll fucking take.__

__**One connection available,** it chirps in a helpful tone. **Connect to wifi network HorseGod413?**_ _

___Uh, yes? Yes yes yes, connect, connect,_ he urges it, and a bright line appears, kind of, in his brain, sort of, he can't see it but he can sense it, stretching up and down like a fireman's pole._ _

__**Two systems are connecting to the network. Access system?** _ _

___Yes?_ he tries again, because, okay, this is working, stuff is happening, he's not sure _what_ this stuff is but at least events are occurring._ _

__**Access system 1: Dogtop, or system 2: Huzzmaster612's Stress Machine?** _ _

___One, one,_ he says, and suddenly things *exist* again. It's an improvement, even if he pops into existence feeling all weird and insubstantial, and his newly-reexisting eyes water with highlighter-liquid tears at the brightness and the whiteness of his field of view. "Ew," he mumbles, entirely to himself, and squeezes them shut, and then squeezes his hands and beats his wing and wiggles his tail. Okay, all accounted for. He totally exists again. He's possibly inside someone's computer but he exists so he'll fucking take it. Victory for Davesprite! He'd cheer except it'd look stupid, make him feel stupid, and genuinely be entirely stupid._ _

__"Woohoo," he mumbles, and pumps a fist into the air anyway, a little wobbly still._ _

__"Wow, what are you cheering about?" someone asks from next to him, and he sits up, startled, blinking his eyes open and beholding... a flower with a face._ _

__Well, no weirder than his classmates in the last place, and he says, "Uh, well, I still exist, and that's pretty cool for now. Like maybe sometime soon I'll get tired of existing and stop doing that but I'd like to have a say in when that happens--" Wait okay that's enough. He stumbles to an unsteady mumble, and crosses his arms because-- actually he's kinda *cold*-- oh, shit, it's super mega snowy here, what the fuck?-- and the flower tips its head to the side, a big smile on its face. Okay, cool, didn't freak out the stranger. Yet._ _

__"Well, you're right about you existing!" it chirps, and wiggles its leaves. "Which is pretty funny, because I've never seen you before! And I know _everyone_ around here." Its head tilts the other way. It's a little creepy-- kind of reminds him of Terezi-- which makes it kinda comforting, actually, in a weird stupid way. "So what's that about?"_ _

__"Yeah I just got here," he mumbles, and rubs his arms. When was the last time he was cold? "You can't have met me before if I just got here."_ _

__"Hmmm," the flower says, and glances around. "I don't know that I like that. Why would you be here now?"_ _

__Davesprite just kind of stares at the flower for a few seconds, and then answers, slowly, "I dunno, why are you here now? Why is anyone anywhere? Holy shit that sounded so stupid, forget I said it." He rubs his temple with the heel of his hand. His head hurts, when was the last time his head hurt?_ _

__"I know why _I'm_ here," the flower says, a little derisively, though its big smile doesn't budge._ _

__"Wow fucking great for you," he says, and curls his tail up so he can press his forehead to it, like he has real boy knees. "Hey do you want some advice? Don't try not existing, it's really making having a physical form kind of suck. Well. Dubiously physical. You know."_ _

__The flower doesn't say anything, which is new, and he peeks over his not-knees to see it staring at him with a weird, unreadable expression._ _

__Theeere he goes. Stranger: Freaked Out. Another point for Davesprite's inability to shut his pie-hole, putting him at zero to he doesn't know man does he look like the Knight of Scoreboards._ _

__"Sorry," he mumbles, and closes his eyes._ _

__He hears a rustle of leaves, and the flower says, slowly, "Yeah, I do know, but I don't like it at all that _you_ know," and then there's a shock of stat̡ic through h̛is di͘git͞al bir͘d͢b҉on͘es̴_ _

__•••_ _

__Davesprite exists, in the cold, flat on his back in the snow, which is not where he was last time he remembers existing. He was sitting up, right? And there was a flower? How long ago was that? He must have lost some time._ _

__He checks his internal clock for how many seconds ago it was._ _

__He gets back a negative number._ _

__"Oh," he says flatly, "okay, sure, that sounds great, why don't we travel back in time. Sure. Great. Okay." He sounds like an idiot, and he bites his lip to shut himself. Pushing himself up, leaning back on his hands and looking around, he's maybe kind of in the same place he was before? There's still snow, and now that he's looking more there's trees and rocks and a deep darkness above him and distant lights, and the snow is cold on his orange skin, but it's not like he's ever spent a whole lot of time in forests. Not a whole lotta forests in downtown Houston. Not a lot of snow, either._ _

__He shivers, and wraps his wing around himself, and floats a little unsteadily upright. He's still feeling weird, but less weird and overwhelmed than he did in future-before, and there kind of looks like civilization over in that direction over in the direction he's turned. Maybe he can find someone and figure out what the fuck is going on?_ _

__•••_ _

__Everything seems easy enough to grasp. The locals greet him cheerfully, and ask him what kind of monster he is, and if he's okay?, and once he assures them that the bloody wingstump and equally bloody bandages are just how he looks, they accept him warmly into their snowy home. It's nowhere near as weird as his time with Cousin, and it's pretty fast that he settles in, unsure of what he can do here-- unsure if there's anything he should do. He wasn't _brought_ here, after all, and he hasn't run into an obvious protagonist yet, so the Sprite's usually-urgent need to be cryptically tutorializing hasn't reared up._ _

__"So why are we down here?" he asks at one point, and after a weird look and an excuse that he's got a really bad memory, a big brown bear-man happily tells him the history of the Underground. Humans were shitty, Monsters got shoved down here, maybe someday they'll get out-- the plot resolves easily in his mind. Someone someday will come along and then the monsters get out, it's as obvious as the butt on a smuppet, right?_ _

__But whoever it is isn't here _now_. Davesprite is free, for a while, to do whatever he likes._ _

__It's a little scary. It's been-- two-hundred-fifty-three-million-- a _while_ since he wasn't on a track something else set for him, the endless cycle of dating sim, the railroad of doomed timelines on every side in SBURB-- the railroad of _being doomed_ \--_ _

__It's a little scary._ _

__But Davesprite is willing to be brave for a while. _What would Cousin do?_ he thinks to himself, and concludes that Cousin would probably try and date someone, because that was kinda their thing. Or roll the biggest snowball in the universe. Because rolling was also kinda their thing. _What would John do?_ he thinks to himself, and it hurts because he's further away from John now than he was before, but John would also tell him he's cool and encourage him to watch a stupid movie and ask when he was going to update his comic._ _

__They don't have Ghostbusters 2 or Con Air or any of that dumb shit down here, but they do have paper, and pencils, and... it's only been a few days since he last fucked around in Webcomic Club, but it's familiar, and fun, and he spends a long, long while just drawing, and drawing, and drawing. He kind of spends weeks doing it. Doesn't need to sleep, doesn't get tired, so why the fuck not draw until he's got all his ideas out of his brain and he's used to freedom again?_ _

__He's really in the g͏ro͟o̧v̶e whe͞n_ _

__•••_ _

__Davesprite exists, in the cold, flat on his back in the snow, which is not where he was last time he remembers existing._ _

__But it is where he was the last time he remembers waking up like this._ _

__"Oh, fuck," he says, and rolls miserably over, squishing his face into the snow. "It's another fucking loop, isn't it?" he asks his new chilly mattress. "You think you're out of them, and bam, nope, fuck you in PARTICULAR Davesprite Strider, you get to remember every goddamn thing because of your stupid bullshit time powers and no one else does and you'll be here forever, again, like some sort of sick Groundhog's Day where Bill Murray doesn't even know he's fucking up your life." He rolls back onto his back, and yells another _Fuck!_ up to the sky, which makes him feel a little tiny bit better._ _

__At least he's not stuck in a script? It's a vague improvement. And this place is a lot bigger than a high school and a classroom. He could float up and just go... the _other_ direction from before._ _

__•••_ _

__Davesprite goes as far in the other direction as he can. He reaches a wall, with a sealed door, and that stumps him for about three seconds before he realizes that there's a way through a few hundred feet up; after that he wanders through some vaguely dungeon-y rooms (that he feels like he's cheating at, skipping the puzzles by floating over them (but he's not a player, not a protagonist, so they're not for him to solve))._ _

__When he gets to the natural cave, as far as he can get away from Snowdin in this direction, he floats his ghostly non-ass up to the hole in the ceiling of it, and immediately bonks his head on something that's keeping him inside._ _

__"Welp," he says, "okay, so, that's gotta be The Barrier. Impermeable to both monsters and weird feathery assholes." But at least it's new, and and he peers through it as well as he can. There's a whole world out there, supposedly-- hell, probably-- but he isn't gonna see it like this, so he sinks back down to lay on the flowers under it, looking up at the light. "Maybe I'll put down roots here, and bloom into someone who knows what the hell he's doing," he mumbles, and something giggles somewhere nearby._ _

__He sits up, and there, near his tail, is a flower with a face._ _

__"Golly," the flower says, "I feel like putting down roots is more my thing!"_ _

__Despite himself, he snorts, and the flower's smile widens._ _

__"You seem a little lost, though," the flower says, wiggling its petals in a slow wave, staring right at Davesprite. "Did you fall down here? I've never seen you in the Ruins before..."_ _

__He shrugs, and says, "Uh, kinda, I guess?" He's not sure he'd consider the-- the _unexisting_ and then _reexisting_ thing a fall, exactly._ _

__"But you don't look like a human at all!" the flower says, "You look like a monster! So how did you fall down from the human world?"_ _

__"Dude, you can't just tell someone they don't look human," he says, and flops back into the flowers, brow a little furrowed. "I'm a solid twenty-five percent human, just so you know."_ _

__There's a soft rustle, and the flower is suddenly a lot closer, face bent over Davesprite's. Despite himself, he caws, and wiggles a few inches away, the feathers of his ruff and wing puffing in alarm._ _

__Its eyes track him unnervingly, and it straightens up, prying, "So, what's the rest of you? How are you _part_ human? I know you're not a boss monster, so you can't have a human's soul..."_ _

__" _Rude,_ " Davesprite mumbles to himself, and tells the flower, "You can't go asking me these things and not even introduce yourself, have you never talked to someone before? Come on, dude."_ _

__The flower stares at him, looking totally unamused... and then giggles, grin wide. "How silly of me! My name's Flowey! Flowey the Flower! And what's your name, Mr. Quarter Human?"_ _

__"Davesprite," he answers, because only Real Dave gets to be just Dave._ _

__"Great! Now we're introduced! Why don'tcha tell me about how you're part human?" it says, with an innocent flutter of its eyelashes, which is a pretty weird thing to see. Not as weird as a spaceship playing Juliet on a highschool stage, maybe. But pretty weird._ _

__"Actually," he decides, "nah." And he floats up, totally intending to bail on this weirdo-- and something flashes in Flowey's eyes, for just a second, that makes him pause._ _

__"Well, your funeral!" the flower chirps, and his birdbones feel like a badly compressed JPEĢ f͘or̨ ̢a҉ sec͏on̷d̡_ _

__•••_ _

__Davesprite exists, in the cold, flat on his back in the snow._ _

__"Did I just die?" he asks the sky. "I think I just died. Did I get killed by a flower? Damn, that's embarrassing. Rose'll never let me hear the end of this--"_ _

__Rose will never hear about this, he remembers, and his heart shatters more for that than it did the dying._ _

__"... stop feeling sorry for yourself, you sad sack of birdshit," he mumbles, after he lets a few tears go, and sits up, wipes them away, and takes a deep breath. Okay, so, Flowey the Flower is fucking dangerous, got it. But death doesn't stop the loop, he just reloads in when it starts again, he can deal with that. Not ideal, but no consequences, right?_ _

___Interesting,_ he thinks._ _

__"Wait, what?" he mumbles out loud._ _

___This could be good, _something thinks.__ _ _

____"What in Bill Murray's own personal hell is going on," he asks the distant rocky sky. "That's not the Sprite--"_ _ _ _

_____Let me help you,_ something thinks to Davesprite, and promises, _I'll make sure it's lots of fun,_ which is kind of unsettling, but--_ _ _ _

____"Can't exactly say no, can I?" he asks, because whatever's going on, it's already happening, and a giggle burbles from somewhere inside him._ _ _ _

**Author's Note:**

> Namco High was a freemium browser dating sim, made by What Pumpkin Studios (aka Homestuck People) in collab with some Normal People. It was extremely short-lived, because Namco decided we can't have nice things like dating the Galaga ship anymore, and the servers were shut down after about six months. As a lot of people had paid $15 to have every character (including the Homestuck crossover ones) available for smoochin', this kinda sucked.
> 
> Somewhere in the same vague timeframe of Namco High existing, Toby Fox was making Undertale in the basement of the Homestuck creator's house.
> 
> Davesprite, the main character of this dumb fic, is a Homestuck character who was a normal(-ish) 13-year-old boy named Dave who started playing a "fun" videogame with his friends. In this game, he got cool time powers, sick swords, a dead best friend, and three godawful months stuck in a doomed timeline with a terrible cursed ventriloquist's puppet as his in-game guide.
> 
> Sick of this bullshit, he jumped back in time to before the ventriloquist's puppet could be fused into the guide NPC (and before his best friend died), gave his past self all his awesome gear, and hopped into the guide NPC himself, fusing himself with the programming of the game (and the poor dead crow that was already in the guide NPC). And thus a certainty that he's a superfluous Dave was born! Also a bunch of other stuff happened, like so much, jesus christ there's a lot of things in Homestuck, but that's most of the important parts.
> 
> And then he appeared in Namco High as the only character who remembers the previous playthroughs so every time you date him he remembers falling in love and losing the player character before! _dear Namco High who asked you to make me, the author, personally cry_?
> 
> If there's anything else that you have questions about, feel ABSOLUTELY free to ask, I would love to tell you about Homestuck. Or Namco High. Or Undertale?


End file.
